A 27-year-old elephant named Devidasan developed a painful 19-inch crack in his tusk over the past five years. CV Pradeep, a dentist in Kerala, India, did some research and decided to fill the crack with the same resin used to repair human teeth. The difference: repairing the tusk took 47 tubes of resin in a two-hour operation!

"It was literally an elephantine task, because we had to find specialist equipment and modify it," Dr Pradeep said.

"The main difference between this and a similar operation carried out on humans is that we were not able to use X-ray screening, because none of our mobile X-ray units was large enough to suit the elephant's needs."

Dr Pradeep, a professor at the PSM dental college in the town of Trichur, said that if the crack remained untreated dirt would have gathered inside it and potentially caused a deadly infection.

The elephant was not tranquilized, and remained cooperative through the procedure. The repair seems to have eased his toothache. Link -via Arbroath

Greedo may not have shot first, but at least you thought the Star Wars character was male. Well, the character might be male, but he was played by two actors because of scheduling problems: Maria de Aragon and Paul Blake. I believe this photo probably shows Aragon in costume. -via Geeks Are Sexy

You may have seen hand-printed marbled paper on the inside covers of books, or inside old luggage or cabinets. This pattern was achieved by floating inks and other chemicals on a liquid surface and then pressing paper against it. Variations in the basic process lead to different types of patterns, like this Spanish moiré on Turkish with gold vein pattern.

The pattern is created by making a Turkish pattern where the first colour used is gold. As further colours are dropped to complete the Turkish pattern, the gold constricts into veins. Then a paper, which has been folded in half is laid onto the bath, moving slightly from side to side to create the curvilinear gradations typical of this pattern.

Learn how other vintage patterns were made at BibliOdyssey. Link

Wouldn't you love to browse a shop like this? Hoxton Street Monster Supplies in London is a Ministry of Stories project that gives children a place to go for inspiration and where they can write and get help with their school work. It was inspired by Dave Eggars' 826 project responsible for the Brooklyn Superhero Supply Store in New York. The Hoxton Street store shelves are filled with items like brain jam and organ marmalade, pickled eyeballs, human snot, and my favorite, a canned vague sense of unease. Link -via b3ta

Olga Kotelko is an athlete. She holds 23 world records, mostly track records for the category of age 90 and up! Kotelko is 91 years old and runs, jumps, and throws a javelin in "masters" meets for those age 35 and over. Her success has led scientists to study her abilities in hopes of finding out how some bodies age at a predictable rate and others don't.

Kotelko herself speaks often of the perils of getting carried away. “If you undertrain, you might not finish,” she says. “If you overtrain, you might not start.” But there’s some evidence that, in trying to find the sweet spot between staying in race shape and avoiding the medical tent, a lot of seniors athletes aren’t training hard enough — or at least, aren’t training the right way to maximally exploit what their body can still do.

Kotelko plans to continue competing and is looking forward to a new set of world records -when she reaches the "95 and over" age category. Link -via Buzzfeed

(Image credit: Patrik Giardino for The New York Times)

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The thylacine, or "Tasmanian tiger" is considered to have gone extinct in 1936, when the last known specimen died at a zoo. But occasional sightings are reported, if not confirmed. Last year, Murray McAllister caught this nine seconds of footage among hours of recordings in the Australian wilderness. Could this be a thylacine? Read his story of searching for the creature on his blog. Link -via Animal Planet

Previously: Thylacine Video

On behalf of everyone here at Neatorama, I extend our sincerest wishes for a Happy Thanksgiving! May your holiday be filled with family, friends, food, football, and fun. We owe a great big thanks to all of YOU for making this past year a success for this site! Posting may be pretty light the rest of the day. For those in other countries, once you've had your fill of what's here, may I suggest you check out the extensive links at the NeatoHub.

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A few days ago, Allie Brosch described in detail the confusion her dogs went through when wearing their first shoes. So you can witness that sort of thing yourself, here is Booba, a presumably normal Shi Tzu wearing his new yellow shoes. He doesn't appear to be accustomed to wearing shoes. -via Buzzfeed

President Obama upheld a presidential tradition and pardoned the official White House turkey yesterday in Washington. Since 1947, the National Turkey Federation and the Poultry and Egg National Board have given a turkey to the US president as a gift. But the pardons are a relatively recent innovation.

Since then, presidents have been more likely to call the turkey dinner than give it a reprieve. But a notable exception occurred in 1963, when President Kennedy, referring to the turkey given to him, said, "Let's just keep him." It wasn't until 1989, during the first Thanksgiving of President George H.W. Bush, that a turkey was officially pardoned.

Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama have all upheld the turkey pardoning tradition. However, some confusion still abounds regarding the true origin of this practice. Some claim that Harry Truman pardoned the turkey he received in 1947, but the Truman Library has been unable to prove this as fact. Others say that the tradition dates back to Abraham Lincoln's pardoning of his son Tad's pet turkey.

SFGate details the fates of the pardoned turkeys, including the 2010 bird. Link

A new species of "squid worm" has been found 3,000 meters below sea level in the Celebes Sea east of Borneo. Not only is it is previously unknown species, it has its own newly coined genus as well.

Researchers, from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts and the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in California named it Teuthidodrilus samae – a new genus and species. They said: "This illustrates how much we have to learn about even the large, common inhabitants of deep pelagic communities."

In a series of exploration dives, researchers spotted the worm, slowly rising and falling in the water around 100m above the seafloor, where it feeds on passing plankton. The worm swims or treads water by waving hundreds of bristles that run along the length of its body on either side.

The 10 slender arm-like appendages that give the worm its unusual appearance are a combination of elongated gills and sensory organs. They are probably used to pick scraps of food from the "marine snow" of organic detritus that constantly falls to the seabed from above. Each is as long or longer than the whole of the worm's body.

Watch the creature swim in a video at the Guardian. Link -via Metafilter

A genetic study of Icelandic natives found a genetic variation in 80 people similar to a variation found mostly in Native Americans. The genetic code was traced back to four women who lived around 1700. But the history of Iceland leads experts to believe the gene must've entered the population hundreds of years earlier. The simplest answer so far that fits the facts is that some Viking brought back a Native American wife from North America, who then bore the first Viking-American child in Iceland.

"We know that Vikings sailed to the Americas," said Agnar Helgason of deCODE Genetics and the University of Iceland, who co-wrote the study with his student Sigrídur Ebenesersdóttir and colleagues. "So all you have to do is assume … that they met some people and ended up taking at least one female back with them.

"Although it's maybe interesting and surprising, it's not all that incredible," Helgason added. "The alternative explanations to me are less likely"—for example the idea that the genetic trait might exist independently, undiscovered, in a few Europeans.

Link -Thanks, Marilyn!

(Image credit: Robert Harding Picture Library, Alamy)

In this version of the Thanksgiving story, Mario fled a famine to try raising power-ups in the New World. He had a hard time until he and his people made friends with the natives, which, of course, eventually leads to a feast. Link -Thanks, Scott!

An anonymous benefactor in Canton, Ohio placed a newspaper ad near Christmas in 1933 and asked for people in need to contact him. At the height of the Great Depression, many were in dire straits and responded by mail. The mysterious "B. Virdot" sent $5 (a generous sum at the time) to 150 families. Virdot never revealed his identity. Then in 2008, Ted Gup unearthed those letters and found out that his grandfather was the man who handed out the money.

His real name was Sam Stone. "B. Virdot" was a combination of his daughters' names—Barbara, Virginia (my mother) and Dorothy. My grandmother had mentioned something about his largesse to my mother when she was a young adult, but it had remained a family secret. Now, 30 years after her father's death, she was comfortable letting the secret out.

Collectively, the letters offer a wrenching vision of the Great Depression and of the struggle within the souls of individuals, many too proud to speak of their anguish even to their loved ones. Some sought B. Virdot's generosity not for themselves, but for their neighbors, friends or relatives. Stirred by their words, I set out to find what became of them, tracking down their descendants, wondering if the $5 gifts had made any difference. From each family, I received permission to use the letter.

Read some of the stories of those families at Smithsonian magazine. Link

The man your man could smell like meets the most interesting man in the world. Isaiah Mustafa (the Old Spice Guy) posted a picture of his meeting with Jonathan Goldsmith, the Dos Equis beer guy. And somehow the space/time continuum remained intact. Link -via reddit

Haikyo is a Japanese word for abandoned ruins. Michael Gakuran explored an abandoned home in Japan some call the Royal House, possibly because among the contents are pre-war portraits of the Japanese Emperor and the Royal family.

In pre-WWII Japan, the Emperor was still revered as a living deity and to look upon him was thought of as an immense privilege. Distribution of the Imperial Family Portraits was not compulsory and schools had to petition to the Ministry in order to receive one, which was usually granted on grounds of academic excellence. Because the official portraits were on loan from the Imperial Household Ministry, protecting the picture from harm was deemed of utmost importance. Having the picture lost or damaged, even from natural disasters like fires or earthquakes, was seen as such a serious failure of duty that there were incidents of school officials committing suicide in an act of repentance.

There are plenty of pictures of the house and contents, but Gakuran has many more photographs he did not publish because of the fine line between documenting history and invading the former occupant's privacy. Link -via Metafilter